Category: General.

Hostgator.com - my webhosting surprise

8 months ago I was in trouble: I had very little disk space, tight bandwidth, only two mysql databases, limited number of subdomains, no shell access, even some downtimes AND especially, I could not host more than one domain name on the same account with my previous hosting solution. More, I was getting a lot of emails per day and they were eating up my web disk space very fast. I had to move.

So I started googling and looking at existing offers and webhosting solutions available out there, read a lot of customer reviews and comparison charts until my head was going to explode. There are many eye-catching offers on the web: lots of space, almost unlimited resources, and so on, at very little cost. At least that’s what is written on their websites. Many of the reviews seemed like payed for, and I had a hard time reading between the lines, looking for something reliable that would worth the money and offer some guarantees.

To make things short: From all the offers, one company caught my attention: Hostgator.com. Why? Simply because they offered more information than others about what they offer, who they are, etc. The reviews about it were good, and all of them emphasized the professional technical support they are offering, including the online 24/7 support.

What I initially liked: I liked the way they put up the offer, the fact that they offer guidelines on how to find a good hosting and what to look for when you search for one, the advice they give that you should not pay for too much time in advance, and so on. The offer seemed decent, 5Gb diskspace and 50 Gb bandwidth, and a lot of other features including unlimited domains/websites hosted on one account, unlimited databases, shell access, etc at as little as approx 9USD at that time.
I also liked their tagline: “Hostgator.com - we eat up the competition“.

OK. So, I ordered a “Baby” account, moved my domain and added a bunch of others, including the one this blog is hosted on. I tested the live support several times and was satisfied with their promptness and over the time I had no unpleasant experience with this hosting company. You could already call me a satisfied customer.

Two months later came the first big surprise: A huge increase in their hosting plans specifications, from 5Gb space for my plan, they jumped to over 100Gb and the bandwidth went to over 1000Gb monthly. Right now, it seems that the plans are changing again.

But there is another nice surprise I wanted in fact to tell you about:
For one of my websites I needed to install an online learning system made in PHP and called ILIAS. I uploaded it, installed it, and everything seemed to work ok, except the editing feature.

I discovered that ILIAS needed some additional PHP modules compiled on the server and which were not part of the Hostgator’s default PHP installation. I was sad because I imagined that being on a shared server together with probably hundreds of other clients on it, the hosting company will never recompile the server’s PHP installation only for one customer.

Without much hope, I sent an email to support, telling them the problem I had. They initially indicated that I should try using PHP5 which was also installed and check if it solves the problem. I checked and the problem was not solved, so I reported back to them.

Three hours later I got an email back from them:

Hello, PHP5 is now being recompliled. Please let us know if you have any further issues with this. Thank you for choosing HostGator.com! Best regards.

Imagine my surprise on this one. The guys from technical support on Hostgator.com simply did it. They recompiled the default PHP installation on a shared server only for a small customer among many others on the same machine. This made me a fan of Hostgator.com especially after my previous experiences with other hosting companies and I decided that a blog article recommending them is worth the effort.

Since they offer 30 days money back guarantee, I think it’s worth trying their hosting solution.

What’s in this article for me? Well, first of all, I am sharing my satisfaction with you in the hope it helps. Also, while looking through their website I discovered the affiliates program and I enrolled. This means that if you decide to try this hosting solution and use the links from my page to get there and enroll, I will get a small commission for a sincere advice I gave.

So, I pass this choice to you: